You Too Were Once on Fire

The poems in Peter Murphy's new collection make us wise. Like us, he is worn from traveling as he swirls across the Atlantic from Wales. Unlike us, he is a comet of consciousness which his latest trail of words sets ablaze. These poems made me feel blessed to have read them and have a very real chance of being passed down from generation to generation.

     -Joel Dias-Porter, Ideas of Improvisation

I took a teenaged niece to an organ recital once, and her reaction afterward was, "It was so sad!" Maybe, I said, but wasn't it just so damned beautiful as well? I think it was Picasso, though it might have been Peter Murphy, who said that art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. That's what happens in this wonderful book: sure, the carnival season is ending, as one poem says, but if we don't want that to happen, all we have to do is lie and say, it's still going on, the Ferris wheel's still spinning, the midway still crammed with booths selling sausage dogs, cotton candy, fried pickles. And isn't that lie lovelier than the thing itself? "Grief and relief / rhyme," says another poem, and if there's grief aplenty here, there's a hundred times as much grace, as much elegance, as much unflagging splendor. 

-David Kirby, The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023